I Made a Vow to Put Our Family First

Hello to you!
Has it been awhile since you’ve heard from me? Of course it has, and would you care to know why? I had to put my family first. Don’t worry, we didn’t have any family deaths, or illnesses, nor a house fire or encounter a natural disaster. We just had life blow up in our faces for a short time.

My wonderful husband finally received a promotion he has been wanting for quite awhile. While I thought of it at first as a wondrous blessing, I soon came to realize this new phase in our life was starting to feel like a roller coaster. A week before Hurricane Harvey tore through Texas, my husband was given this new job. We live in Tulsa, OK so you wouldn’t think the hurricane would have an affect on us, but it did. His new position put him in charge of a huge terminal down in Houston and well since then his time home has been much much shorter. This was a major blow for me, as I felt blindsided by all the responsibility on my shoulders day after day. It wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle, but I was so focused on how awesome life was before this promotion. Basically, things were fairy tale perfect.

This is why I’ve made it a point to depend only on myself. It isn’t that I can’t depend on my husband or friends for that matter, its the fact of banking on someone else to do something to help me, and then finding they are unable. I’m left with a messier mess than before. So, in order to calm the storm of overwhelming chaos, I went back to square one.

Just as before (here’s a link to what was going on before) I started with prayer and faith. My children needed me more than ever during this time of new transition. They need a mother they could depend on to hold up the walls of the house while dad was gone with work. In order to be that mom for them, and not feel defeated every other second, I needed God. I wouldn’t be able to do this alone and so I called on God to give me strength, patience, and calmness. I even went as far as asking my husband to pray for those things for me.

The second task I tackled was keeping to our routines. I’ve talked about our household routines as far as cleaning and keeping up with chores, but this went even further. Typically my husband would bring our oldest daughter to school. She’s three and only goes twice a week, but she loves that little bit of time with her dad as they drive to school without the whole gang. She gets dropped off at 7:45am but school doesn’t start until much later. She has that whole time to get acclimated and settled in the classroom. Dad has had a few mornings he’s been out of town or needed to be at work much earlier. While it would be easier for me to drop our girl off closer to 9:00am, I needed to keep something consistent. The same goes with bath time and bed time. Their dad does both in a very particular way. My jobs of tidying up dinner and getting laundry going and whatever else is on my plate that night had to wait while I tended to the kids’ needs first. It all seems very simple, but keeping to their routine, meant stepping out of my own. There were many little moments I had to step back and reevaluate because the kids were trying to send me a message. (I want to also note, it was very important for me to also ask them to be flexible with certain things, because I’m not God, and I’m not perfect, and well, that list goes on and on. Flexibility is a great tool for young children to have in their toolbox.)

After the kids were off to bed, I finished my tasks so I could stay on top of my chores and the tasks that help me feel like life is orderly. A cleaner home can really make a difference in my day to day, but I had to start small. I occasionally got behind on the laundry. The dust was piling up everywhere I looked, and the sweeping was non existent for quite awhile. At the end of the day I was kaputs! My body was aching from being seven and eight months pregnant and trying to keep up with all of my responsibilities. While I wanted to sleep I couldn’t get much rest because, well, I was seven and eight months pregnant.

I had to place my writing on the back burner, because my family needed me. When I began this business that was my top priority. I wouldn’t allow any part of this business to step on the toes of my husband and kids. If I wanted to be successful, I would have to figure a way around that concept, or be done with it all together. In the last five months or less, I revamped this blog and found a way to keep up with my special project “Women of Grace” and design a daily planner for future sales. I’ve kept busy with all of that while tending to my family first. That’s my definition of success, but when my husband started calling home to eat without him or sending me a list of dates he would be out of town, that successful feeling swirled down the drain.

The last thing that needed to be done in order for my family to have the best version of me in front of them daily was some time away. I’m forever grateful to my friends here in Tulsa, our best neighbor friends took the kids so I could enjoy a cheap evening away. I found time to visit with some ladies while working on a craft project. I received messages from another gal pal randomly and they always seemed to come when I needed them the most! (Coincidentally, I have a blog about that too!) All of this took me away just long enough to help set my “reset button”.

The point I’d like to reinforce here is that I felt like I had my life organized completely but once I was asked to make new arrangements or carry new responsibilities me life started to feel quaky, like it could crumble right out from under me. I never anticipated having to relearn how to tackle everything all over again. Now that life is orderly, I see that I didn’t learn to accomplish anything new, I just had to be flexible. I had to do the same things I had been doing just in a new way. Even though I thought I had the “it” factor for life, I had to regain my “it” factor again, and I assume I’ll have to do so at another point later down the road. Sort of like marriage, or any other relationship, you constantly have to work at it, and often you’re working on the same things over and over, even after you believed you had figured it out.

Regardless of everything written above, I do want to apologize for being MIA for awhile. This blog, sometimes it feels more like a diary, is another thing I need. It is another element that helps his “reset” when life is chaotically spiraling. I need you, reader, to help motivate me to do great things. I definitely needed my “Women of Grace” series to help me with some of the other motherly and wifely performance struggles I’ve battled lately. I say sorry, knowing it could happen again, because I have to be fully present for my family to get through the rocky times, no matter what that entails, or the magnitude of the situation. I want my husband and children to trust I will be there when they’re falling, or when things are confusing among many other emotions. I will always put my family first, and if I can still blog, photograph, and create in the process that is all the success I need.